If you operate an online shop, or any ecommerce business really, you have a specific set of actions you want visitors to do. It might be to sign up to a mailing list, complete a contact form to register a sales enquiry, request a call back, book a service or buy a product. To track visitor progress through this path, we use Google Analytics Goal setting and Goal Funnels.

Why track the path

Tracking that path isn't what is important here though. What we are interested in is tracking the drop off between the steps. Every extra step we have is a place where visitors drop out and don't become customers. The difference between the number of visitors that reach a step an dthe number that continue to the next is called a conversion rate. Knowing the conversion rates along your funnel allows you to assess the effectiveness of changes and allows you to compare your conversion rates at each point.

A social network is a type of virtual community, however whereas most traditional virtual communities were based on the content and information discussed (communities of interest), the revolution of social networking places relationships at the centre of the communities. Social Networking services (SNS) are more about people and their relationships than connecting content itself.

• A virtual community is a forum of exchanging information about common interests. They provide a sense of place and belonging based on those shared interests. Often they develop into congenial and stimulating dialogue between the members and much interesting information can be shared, even leading to more extended relationships in some instances.
• SNS is typically distinguishable in that they are about relationships - they allow a more detailed personal profile to be developed, they tend to allow members to articulate a list of 'friends' and they tend to allow members to navigate and peruse others' list of friends. In this way members can find others through their extended friends networks - friend of a friend (FOAF).

It seems that lots of companies know that you can track your email campaigns with Google Analytics (GA), but not so many know how to do it or have actually tried to implement it. In this article I'll briefly explain how it works and all you really need to know to track most campaigns.

The premise behind tracking is very simple, instead of having a unique landing page for each marketing campaign, each marketing effort is tagged and tracked by its URLs.There are just three tags that are required for campaign tracking to work, you can learn about the optional ones here.